Complete Works

by Plato, Cooper, John M. , Hutchinson, D. S.

  CLINIAS: I’m sure I’m in the same predicament as you, Megillus. I find it acutely difficult to say for sure that the constitution we have in Cnossus comes into any of these categories.

  ATHENIAN: And the reason, gentlemen, is this: you really do operate constitutions worthy of the name. The ones we called constitutions just now are not really that at all: they are just a number of ways of running a state, all of which involve some citizens living in subjection to others like slaves, and the state is named after the ruling class in each case. But [713] if that’s the sort of principle on which your new state is to be named, it should be called after the god who really does rule over men who are rational enough to let him.

  CLINIAS: What god is that?

  ATHENIAN: Well, perhaps we ought to make use of this fiction a little more, if we are going to clear up the question at issue satisfactorily.

  CLINIAS: Yes, that will be the right procedure.

  ATHENIAN: It certainly will. Well now, countless ages before the formation of the states we described earlier,5 they say there existed, in the age of [b] Cronus, a form of government and administration which was a great success, and which served as a blueprint for the best run of our present-day states.

  CLINIAS: Then I think we simply must hear about it.

  ATHENIAN: Yes, I agree. That’s just why I introduced it into the discussion.

  CLINIAS: You were quite right to do so, and seeing how relevant it is, [c] you’ll be entirely justified in giving a systematic account of what happened.

  ATHENIAN: I must try to meet your wishes. The traditional account that has come down to us tells of the wonderfully happy life people lived then, and how they were provided with everything in abundance and without any effort on their part. The reason is alleged to be this: Cronus was of course aware that human nature, as we’ve explained,6 is never able to take complete control of all human affairs without being filled with arrogance [d] and injustice. Bearing this in mind, he appointed kings and rulers for our states; they were not men, but beings of a superior and more divine order—spirits. We act on the same principle nowadays in dealing with our flocks of sheep and herds of other domesticated animals: we don’t put cattle in charge of cattle or goats in charge of goats, but control them ourselves, because we are a superior species. So Cronus too, who was well-disposed to man, did the same: he placed us in the care of the spirits, a superior order of beings, who were to look after our interests—an easy enough [e] task for them, and a tremendous boon to us, because the result of their attentions was peace, respect for others, good laws, justice in full measure, and a state of happiness and harmony among the races of the world. The story has a moral for us even today, and there is a lot of truth in it: where the ruler of a state is not a god but a mortal, people have no respite from toil and misfortune. The lesson is that we should make every effort to imitate the life men are said to have led under Cronus; we should run our public and our private life, our homes and our cities, in obedience to what [714] little spark of immortality lies in us, and dignify these edicts of reason with the name of ‘law’. But take an individual man, or an oligarchy, or even a democracy, that lusts in its heart for pleasure and demands to have its fill of everything it wants—the perpetually unsatisfied victim of an evil greed that attacks it like the plague—well, as we said just now, if a power like that controls a state or an individual and rides roughshod over the laws, it’s impossible to escape disaster. This is the doctrine we have to [b] examine, Clinias, and see whether we are prepared to go along with it—or what?

  CLINIAS: Of course we must go along with it.

  ATHENIAN: You realize that some people maintain that there are as many different kinds of laws as there are of political systems? (And of course we’ve just run through the many types of political systems there are popularly supposed to be.) Don’t think the question at issue is a triviality: it’s supremely important, because in effect we’ve got back to arguing about the criteria of justice and injustice. These people take the line that legislation [c] should be directed not to waging war or attaining complete virtue, but to safeguarding the interests of the established political system, whatever that is, so that it is never overthrown and remains permanently in force. They say that the definition of justice that measures up to the facts is best formulated like this.

  CLINIAS: How?

  ATHENIAN: It runs: ‘Whatever serves the interest of the stronger’.

  CLINIAS: Be a little more explicit, will you?

  ATHENIAN: The point is this: according to them, the element in control at any given moment lays down the law of the land. Right?

  CLINIAS: True enough.

  ATHENIAN: ‘So do you imagine,’ they say, ‘that when a democracy has [d] won its way to power, or some other constitution has been established (such as dictatorship), it will ever pass any laws, unless under pressure, except those designed to further its own interests and ensure that it remains permanently in power? That’ll be its main preoccupation, won’t it?’

  CLINIAS: Naturally.

  ATHENIAN: So the author of these rules will call them ‘just’ and claim that anyone who breaks them is acting ‘unjustly’, and punish him?

  CLINIAS: Quite likely.

  ATHENIAN: So this is why such rules will always add up to ‘justice’.

  CLINIAS: Certainly, on the present argument.

  ATHENIAN: We are, you see, dealing with one of those ‘claims to [e] authority’.7

  CLINIAS: What claims?

  ATHENIAN: The ones we examined before, when we asked who should rule whom. It seemed that parents should rule children, the elder the younger, and the noble those of low birth; and there was a large number of other titles to authority, if you remember, some of which conflicted with others. The claim we’re talking about now was certainly one of these: we said, I think, that Pindar turned it into a law of nature—which meant that he ‘justified the use of force extreme’, to quote his actual words.8 [715]

  CLINIAS: Yes, those are the points that were made.

  ATHENIAN: Now look: to which side in the dispute should we entrust our state? In some cities, you see, this is the sort of thing that has happened thousands of times.

  CLINIAS: What?

  ATHENIAN: When offices are filled competitively, the winners take over the affairs of state so completely that they totally deny the losers and the losers’ descendants any share of power. Each side passes its time in a narrow scrutiny of the other, apprehensive lest someone with memories [b] of past injustices should gain some office and lead a revolution. Of course, our position is that this kind of arrangement is very far from being a genuine political system; we maintain that laws which are not established for the good of the whole state are bogus laws, and when they favor particular sections of the community, their authors are not citizens but party-men; and people who say those laws have a claim to be obeyed are wasting their breath. We’ve said all this because in your new state we [c] aren’t going to appoint a man to office because of his wealth or some other claim like that, say strength or stature or birth. We insist that the highest office in the service of the gods must be allocated to the man who is best at obeying the established laws and wins that sort of victory in the state; the man who wins the second prize must be given second rank in that service, and so on, the remaining posts being allocated in order on the same system. Such people are usually referred to as ‘rulers’, and if I have [d] called them ‘servants of the laws’ it’s not because I want to mint a new expression but because I believe that the success or failure of a state hinges on this point more than on anything else. Where the law is subject to some other authority and has none of its own, the collapse of the state, in my view, is not far off; but if law is the master of the government and the government is its slave, then the situation is full of promise and men enjoy all the blessings that the gods shower on a state. That’s the way I see it.

  [e] CLINIAS: By heaven, sir, you’re quite right. You’ve the sharp eye of an old man for
these things.

  ATHENIAN: Yes, when we’re young, we’re all pretty blind to them; old age is the best time to see them clearly.

  CLINIAS: Very true.

  ATHENIAN: Well, what now? I suppose we should assume our colonists have arrived and are standing before us. So we shall have to finish off the topic by addressing them.

  CLINIAS: Of course.

  ATHENIAN: Now then, our address should go like this: ‘Men, according to the ancient story, there is a god who holds in his hands the beginning [716] and end and middle of all things, and straight he marches in the cycle of nature. Justice, who takes vengeance on those who abandon the divine law, never leaves his side. The man who means to live in happiness latches on to her and follows her with meekness and humility. But he who bursts with pride, elated by wealth or honors or by physical beauty when young and foolish, whose soul is afire with the arrogant belief that so far from needing someone to control and lead him, he can play the leader to others—[b] there’s a man whom God has deserted. And in his desolation he collects others like himself, and in his soaring frenzy he causes universal chaos. Many people think he cuts a fine figure, but before very long he pays to Justice no trifling penalty and brings himself, his home and state to rack and ruin. Thus it is ordained. What action, then, should a sensible man take, and what should his outlook be? What must he avoid doing or thinking?’

  CLINIAS: This much is obvious: every man must resolve to belong to those who follow in the company of God.

  [c] ATHENIAN: ‘So what conduct recommends itself to God and reflects his wishes? There is only one sort, epitomized in the old saying “like approves of like” (excess apart, which is both its own enemy and that of due proportion). In our view it is God who is preeminently the “measure of all things,” much more so than any “man,” as they say.9 So if you want to recommend yourself to someone of this character, you must do your level best to make your own character reflect his, and on this principle [d] the moderate man is God’s friend, being like him, whereas the immoderate and unjust man is not like him and is his enemy; and the same reasoning applies to the other vices too.

  ‘Let’s be clear that the consequence of all this is the following doctrine (which is, I think, of all doctrines the finest and truest): If a good man sacrifices to the gods and keeps them constant company in his prayers and offerings and every kind of worship he can give them, this will be the best and noblest policy he can follow; it is the conduct that fits his character as nothing else can, and it is his most effective way of achieving a happy life. But if the wicked man does it, the results are bound to be [e] just the opposite. Whereas the good man’s soul is clean, the wicked man’s soul is polluted, and it is never right for a good man or for God to receive gifts from unclean hands—which means that even if impious people do [717] lavish a lot of attention on the gods, they are wasting their time, whereas the trouble taken by the pious is very much in season. So this is the target at which we should aim—but what “missiles” are we to use to hit it, and what “bow” is best carried to shoot them? Can we name these “weapons”? The first weapon in our armory will be to honor the gods of the underworld next after those of Olympus, the patron-gods of the state; the former should be allotted such secondary honors as the Even and the Left, while the [b] latter should receive superior and contrasting honors like the Odd.10 That’s the best way a man can hit his target, piety. After these gods, a sensible man will worship the spirits, and after them the heroes. Next in priority will be rites celebrated according to law at private shrines dedicated to ancestral gods. Last come honors paid to living parents. It is meet and right that a debtor should discharge his first and greatest obligation and pay the debt which comes before all others; he must consider that all he [c] has and holds belongs to those who bore and bred him, and he is meant to use it in their service to the limit of his powers. He must serve them first with his property, then with hand and brain, and so give to the old people what they desperately need in view of their age: repayment of all that anxious care and attention they lavished on him, the longstanding “loan” they made him as a child. Throughout his life the son must be very careful to watch his tongue in addressing his parents, because there is a very heavy penalty for careless and ill-considered language; Retribution, [d] messenger of Justice, is the appointed overseer of these things. If his parents get angry, he must submit to them, and whether they satisfy their anger in speech or in action, he must forgive them; after all, he must reflect, it’s natural enough for a father to get very angry if he thinks he’s being harmed by his own son. When the parents die, the most modest burial will be best, and the ceremonies should not be more elaborate than custom demands nor [e] inferior to those with which his forefathers laid their own parents to rest. Year by year he should honor the departed by similar acts of devotion; [718] he will honor them best by never failing to provide a perpetual memorial to them, spending on the dead a proper proportion of the money he happens to have available. If we do that, and live in accordance with these rules, each of us will get the reward we deserve from the gods and such beings as are superior to ourselves, and live in a spirit of cheerful confidence for most of the years of our life.’

  The laws themselves will explain the duties we owe to children, relatives, friends and fellow citizens, as well as the service heaven demands we render to foreigners; they will tell us the way we have to behave in the company of each of these categories of people, if we want to lead a full [b] and varied life without breaking the law. The laws’ method will be partly persuasion and partly (when they have to deal with characters that defy persuasion) compulsion and chastisement; and with the good wishes of the gods they will make our state happy and prosperous. There are a [c] number of other topics which a legislator who thinks as I do simply must mention, but they are not easily expressed in the form of a law. So he should, I think, put up to himself and those for whom he is going to legislate an example of the way to deal with the remaining subjects, and when he has explained them all as well as he can, he should set about laying down his actual code of laws. So what’s the particular form in which such topics are expressed? It’s none too easy to confine one’s exposition of them to a single example, but let’s see if we can crystallize our ideas by looking at the matter rather like this.

  CLINIAS: Tell us what you have in mind.

  ATHENIAN: I should like the citizens to be supremely easy to persuade along the paths of virtue; and clearly this is the effect the legislator will try to achieve throughout his legislation.

  [d] CLINIAS: Of course.

  ATHENIAN: It occurs to me that the sort of approach I’ve just explained,11 provided it is not made to totally uncouth souls, will help to make people more amenable and better disposed to listen to what the lawgiver recommends. So even if the address has no great effect but only makes his listener a trifle easier to handle, and so that much easier to teach, the legislator should be well pleased. People who are anxious to attain moral excellence with all possible speed are pretty thin on the ground and it isn’t easy to find them: most only go to prove the wisdom of Hesiod’s remark that the [e] road to vice is smooth and can be traveled without sweating, because it is very short; but ‘as the price of virtue’, he says,

  The gods have imposed the sweat of our brows,

  And long and steep is the ascent that you have to make

  And rough, at first; but when you get to the top, [719]

  Then the rugged road is easy to endure.12

  CLINIAS: It sounds as if he hit off the situation very well.

  ATHENIAN: He certainly did. But after this discussion I’m left with certain impressions which I want to put forward for your consideration.

  CLINIAS: Do so, then.

  ATHENIAN: Let’s have a word with the legislator and address him like this: ‘Tell us, legislator, if you were to discover what we ought to do and [b] say, surely you’d tell us?’

  CLINIAS: Of course.

  ATHENIAN: ‘Now didn’t we hear you
saying a few minutes ago13 that a legislator ought not to allow the poets to compose whatever happened to take their fancy? You see, they’d never know when they were saying something in opposition to the law and harming the state.’

  CLINIAS: You’re quite right.

  ATHENIAN: Well, then, if we took the poets’ side and addressed the legislator, would this be a reasonable line to take?

  CLINIAS: What?

  ATHENIAN: This: ‘There is an old proverb, legislator, which we poets [c] never tire of telling and which all laymen confirm, to the effect that when a poet takes his seat on the tripod of the Muse, he cannot control his thoughts. He’s like a fountain where the water is allowed to gush forth unchecked. His art is the art of representation, and when he represents men with contrasting characters he is often obliged to contradict himself, and he doesn’t know which of the opposing speeches contains the truth. But for the legislator, this is impossible: he must not let his law say two [d] different things on the same subject; his rule has to be “one topic, one doctrine.” For example, consider what you said just now. A funeral can be extravagant, inadequate or modest, and your choice falls on one of these three—the moderate—which you recommend with unqualified praise. But if I were composing a poem about a woman of great wealth and how she gave instructions for her own funeral, I should recommend the elaborate [e] burial; a poor and frugal character, on the other hand, would be in favor of the cheap funeral, while the moderate man of moderate means would recommend accordingly. But you ought not to use the term “moderate” in the way you did just now: you must say what “moderate” means and how big or small it may be. If you don’t, you must realize that a remark such as you made still has some way to go before it can be a law.’